Plotting the Course, a Billion Miles Away
NASA is going to send a robot to Uranus someday. When it gets there, how close should it fly to the surface?
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The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, 15 Years Later
The venerable Hubble Space Telescope recently revisited the famous Ultra-Deep Field. How has this patch of sky changed since it was first photographed?
200 Millionth Anniversary Gift: A Necklace Made of Stars
Astrobites reports on the aftermath of a massive active galactic nucleus outburst that left behind a string of star formation.
A Hard Look at a Soft-State X-ray Binary
Cygnus X-1 recently made the long-awaited switch between hard and soft spectral states. What can IXPE observations tell us about this transition?
Seeking Solo Super-Fast Pulsars
New surveys with the world’s largest filled-aperture radio dish are turning up more and more millisecond pulsars. What do these surveys tell us about the best places to look for these extreme objects?
Monthly Roundup: Perspectives on the Hubble Tension
The Hubble tension is one of the most pressing problems in cosmology. Today, we’re looking at five articles that address the Hubble tension — either suggesting ways to alleviate it or staunchly reinforcing its existence.
Mooing Magnetars: Modeling the Enigmatic FBOT AT2018cow “The Cow”
Astrobites reports on the fast blue optical transient AT2018cow, which has remained a mystery to astronomers since it was discovered.
Featured Image: Outflows from Baby Stars
New JWST images reveal the dusty, windswept envelopes surrounding five young protostars.
The Featherweight Champion of Black Holes
Models suggest that black holes that weigh less than 5x the mass of the Sun shouldn’t exist. Those models will have to be revisited now that scientists have discovered a featherweight black hole that collided with a neutron star.
Tailor-Made Turbulence for All Your Modeling Needs
A new method for modeling turbulent magnetic fields — important for everything from accretion disks to the solar wind — yields realistic fields while also keeping computational costs low.
How Common Are Solar Systems Like Our Own?
Astrobites reports on the likelihood of exoplanetary systems having both small, close-in planets and large, far-out gas giant planets.
Meet the Progenitor of the Latest Nearby Supernova
Supernova hunters have been busy: SN 2024ggi is the second nearby supernova in less than a year. What do archival observations tell us about this supernova’s progenitor star?